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of detail never troubled him much. His teaching was as the German philosophy calls it, “subjective”; it was to benefit himself, not others. He was a learned egotist. He
he was a learned miser.
“Descend, bold traveler, into the crater of the jokul of Sneffels, which the shadow of Scartaris touches before the calends of July, and you will attain the center of the earth. Which I have done, Arne Saknussemm.”
all the volcanoes are called jokuls, a word that means ‘glacier’ in Icelandic,
“What is darkness to you is light to me.
it is perfectly well known that the internal temperature rises one degree for every seventy feet in depth; now, admitting this proportion to be constant, and the radius of the earth being fifteen hundred leagues, there must be a temperature of 360,032 degrees at the center of the earth. Therefore,
“Oh, with figures you may prove anything!”
Very good! thought I, just the place we want to end our days in; and great as it is, that asylum is not big enough to contain all Professor Liedenbrock’s madness!
Far away on one side was the green country, on the other the sea sparkled, bathed in sunlight.
I repeat to you the love of reading runs in Icelandic blood.
the Danish mile
Mr. Ruhmkorff is a learned and most ingenious man of science; his great discovery is his induction coil, which produces a powerful stream of electricity. He obtained in 1864 the quinquennial prize of 50,000 franc reserved by the French government for the most ingenious application of electricity.
unpleasant, then an immense piece of dried fish floating in butter rancid with twenty years’ keeping, and, therefore, according to Icelandic gastronomy,
much preferable to fresh butter.
horrible disease of leprosy is too common in Iceland;
When science has uttered her voice, let babblers hold their peace.”
unexpected form of a heavy bill, in which everything was charged, even to the very air we breathed in the
Its snowy summit, by an optical illusion not infrequent in mountains, seemed close to us, and yet how many weary hours it took to reach it!
flanks of the mountain formed an angle with the horizon of at least thirty-six degrees;
He himself seemed to possess an instinct for equilibrium,
by the hollow between the two peaks, a kind of staircase appeared unexpectedly that greatly facilitated our ascent.
We had passed the limit of perpetual snow, which, on account of the moisture of the climate, is at a greater elevation in Iceland than the high latitude would give reason to suppose.
understood at once that we must follow Hans at the top of our speed.
The fifteen hundred remaining feet took us five hours to clear;
I had time to observe the midnight sun, at his lowest point, gilding with his pale rays the island that slept at my feet.
Each of us could then descend by holding with the hand both halves of the rope,
blending hues of lava, passing from reddish brown to bright yellow by imperceptible shades?
But one thing troubled me: our supply of water was half-consumed. My uncle reckoned upon a fresh supply from subterranean sources, but hitherto we had met with none.
“What danger?” “The want of water.”
Our provision of water could not last more than three days.
I had kept it as a precious treasure at the bottom of my flask. Twenty times, nay, a hundred times, have I fought against a frightful impulse to drink it off. But no, Axel, I kept it for you.”
Suppose the torrent, bursting through, should drown us in a sudden flood!
where was this water from? No matter. It was water;
This beneficent spring, after having satisfied our thirst on the road, would now be my guide among the windings of the terrestrial crust.
Upon earth, in the midst of the darkest night, light never abdicates its functions altogether. It is still subtle and diffusive, but whatever little there may be, the eye still catches that little. Here there was not an atom; the total darkness made me totally blind.
“Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors that it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.”
What I want is to get the least glimpse of rock or shore, even if our raft should be smashed into shivers!”
But where are we going to? Where?
They were gigantic animals; it was a herd of mastodons—not fossil remains, but alive and resembling those whose bones were found in the marshes of Ohio in 1801.
it was a giant, able to control those monsters. In stature he was at least twelve feet high. His head, huge and unshapely as a buffalo’s, was half-hidden in the thick and tangled
when the Professor stopped me; he, the man of impulse, counseled patience and coolness.
If at every instant we may perish, so at every instant we may be saved.
“Yes, I do; as long as the heart beats, as long as body and soul keep together, I cannot admit that any creature endowed with a will has need to despair of life.”
Hunger once satisfied, it is difficult for a man to imagine the horrors of starvation; they cannot be understood without being felt.
don’t see any other way of reaching the surface of the earth.”
The explosions are going on still, and I don’t think it would look well to have come out by an eruption, and then to get our heads broken by bits of falling rock. Let us get down.
“Come si noma questa isola?”
We were in the midst of the Mediterranean Sea,
The superstitious Italians would have set us down for fire-devils vomited out of hell; so we presented ourselves in the humble guise of shipwrecked mariners. It was not so glorious, but it was safer.
Our faithful Hans, in spite of our entreaties, had left Hamburg; the man to whom we owed all our success and our lives, too, would not allow us to reward him as much as we could have wished. He was seized with the mal de pays, a complaint for which we have not even a name in English.
